Monday, February 28, 2011

My baby sis, CYNTHIA, flew in to Atlanta from Los Angeles this weekend. She's a tax consultant for PRICE WATERHOUSE COOPER and she's in town, along with countless other tax nerds from other accounting firms from all over, to attend special certification classes at GEORGIA TECH. She got to hang out with us for a bit in Athens before her week-long classes started in Atlanta. No visit to Athens would be complete without having some sort of meal at THE GRIT. We decided to get stuffed during brunch time. Cynthia got the 45 RPM PANCAKES - a stack of three wheat pancakes as big and round as seven-inch single records...

In addition to eating out, we also made a point of making a nice home-cooked meal. We cooked up some TIKKA MASALA and Missy made her SPICY TEMPEH dish, which we generously poured over bowls of steaming hot COCONUT RICE...

Hanging out in Cynthia's hotel room, back on Georgia Tech's campus...being from LA, Cynthia was no stranger to people "throwing signs", so I got her a little souvenir and taught her how folks here rep Atlanta by "holding down the A"...

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

New ST. PATRICK'S DAY ONE-INCH BUTTON SETS are in the SHOPPE SUGAR COOKIE on ETSY now! Get yerself a set of badges so you can be ultra stylin' while drinking green beer and jumping around to House of Pain's "Jump Around" on Saint Paddy's Day! Click HERE to find the end of the rainbow...

Monday, February 21, 2011

Last Friday, Missy took OREO back to the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. Oreo had been messing with the STITCHES on her belly, and it looked a little bleedy. Fortunately, it just looked much worse than it actually was and Oreo came back home sporting a plastic COLLAR around her little head, to prevent her from chewing at her wound. Well, the "funnel" didn't stay around her neck that long - she was having trouble eating with it on and...she looked pretty ridiculous. We could tell that it was messing with her self-esteem! So, after just a day of humiliation, we took it off of her...and luckily, she hasn't been messing much with her stitches ever since...

FAVORITE MOMENT OF THE PAST WEEK?MISSY: Bringing Oreo back home from the vet and having her test results come back clear!RAOUL: Oreo's test results confirming that the growths the vet took out of her were non-threatening.

...SPRING CLEANING, that is! We took advantage of the nice weather and worked in the yard for most of Sunday afternoon. Missy cleared all the leaves from our gravel driveway and then I dragged an INDUSTRIAL MAGNET over it, picking up hidden nails and metal debris left over from the roofing job. I stopped counting after finding at least 30 nails...for the past couple of months we haven't been parking too close to the house, for fear of getting a flat tire...

Sunday, February 20, 2011

In lieu of yearly resolutions, I've made a short list of goals I would love for us to accomplish towards our never-ending quest to renovate and rehabilitate our house and yards (a.k.a. OPERATION CUTIFY, or OP CUTE). We bought our house five years ago because we were sick and tired of dealing with unsavory landlord and roommate situations. Buying our beloved house was our big "middle finger" to all that guff. We bought our house at the very beginning of the housing market collapse and got a pretty good deal. Since then, we've been slowly but surely fixing it up, tweaking the house here and there, making our home truly and uniquly OURS. One of the main reasons we got the house at a good price was because the roof needed to be replaced. When we bought our house, we were warned that the roof probably needed to be replaced within the next couple of years...it wasn't until we started to experience major leaks in the roof that we finally buckled down and replaced it with a SHINY NEW TIN ROOF last year. Yay! With that major piece of renovation done and out of the way, we can finally turn our attention to smaller, much doable projects in and around the house.

With the new roof in place, we'd like to add to the curb appeal of our humble abode. We spent so much time on improving the inside of the house that we kinda neglected the outside of the house. We wanted to make the inside as livable as possible since, duh, that is where we spend most of our time. The facade off our house is such a mish-mash of building materials - brick, stone, wood, tin, metal. It would be nice to tie it all together by painting all the trim and facing in one uniform color:

We'd also like to fix up the SLATE WALL BED in our front yard, which has been damaged repeatedly by fallen limbs and family, friends, delivery drivers, and work crews running into it with their trucks and SUVs:

I'd also love to finally replace our ugly and rickety excuse for a MAILBOX:

In the backyard, I'd love if we could finally dismantle the FIRE PIT (buried under leaves here) and bring the soil back to life (ruined by the previous owners who used to burn their trash there), so that we can eventually turn it into a garden. Also, we'd love to finally pull up all the ivy in the back corners and eventually build a little WORK SHED STUDIO:

This little corner at the back of the house is where the spigot is...this corner always gets a bit muddy whenever we use the hose, so we'd like to remedy that by putting down PAVER STONES:

On our enclosed back patio, we'd like to build some sturdy WORK TABLES, where we could maybe put a table saw or use as a gardening and planting station:

Inside, we'd like to renovate our GUEST BATHROOM. The previous owners painted over this pretty PINK TILE with matte gray paint. We finally removed the all the pain-in-the-ass paint from the tile and we're ready to go to the next step...which involves removing all the peeling, cracked, and molding paint; filling in all the holes and cracks with putty; sanding it all down and then painting with a nice high-gloss paint...much easier said than done:

Another project is turning our dreary hallway into a miniature GALLERY to showcase our collection of art, painting, prints, and posters. In addition to repainting, we're going to run a PICTURE RAIL on one continuous wall down the length of the hallway and then install track lighting up above:

In the living room, we'd like to replace the warped CABINET DOORS on our built-in shelving, and finally decide on what color to paint the walls, so we can finally start hanging up some more of our framed art...

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Hey Y'all! Missy just restocked her EXCLUSIVE BUTTON SETS over at SHANALOGIC.COM, a.k.a. your one-stop-shop for all things cute and kawaii! Fresh off the button press and back in the shop are Missy's TINY DINOS SET, TINY TEA SET, and HUGGING ANIMALS SET. And...we're introducing a brand new exclusive set of one inch buttons...TINY SMORES! You can check out all the cuteness at the Shanalogic shop HERE and get 'em before they're gone gone gone!

Monday, February 14, 2011

As you may know, Valentine's Day is also our bunny OREO's Day! We found her ABANDONED IN A PARKING LOT in Atlanta exactly two years ago! Oreo just had her spay surgery last week and they found and removed a couple of suspicious growths, which they are running tests on now. We are hoping for a clean bill of health after her test results come back. We love you, Oreo!

So, if you didn't already know, Missy and I work in the art department of a company that designs "balloons and coordinating gift items"...in our line of work, VALENTINE'S DAY is one of THE biggest holidays. That being said, it's hard to get excited about Valentine's Day when a good portion of your job revolves around it. The BALLOON that Missy is posing with is one that she designed almost a year-and-a-half ago...and it's only finally seeing the light of day this Valentine's season. By the time we see our items in the stores (like Kroger or Ralphs supermarkets) it's already old news to us. We're already wrapping up our designs for Valetine's Day 2012...and even got a head start on Valentine's Day 2013. It's kinda crazy when you think about it...

Sunday, February 13, 2011

(after eating buckets of popcorn and playing "light as a feather, stiff as a board", Missy, Nilla, and Oreo finally settle down for the night)

Missy has been spending the past couple of nights camped out next to Oreo's pen in our "Woodland Room" here at the Ranch. Oreo is convalescing from SURGERY she had done at the University of Georgia's College of Veterinary Medicine. Not only was she spayed, but she also had a couple of suspicious growths removed from her ueterus (we're still awaiting results from the biopsy). Missy (and our cat, Nilla, too!) has been spending the night with our bunny for moral support...and to make sure she doesn't mess around too much with the interior stitches on her shaved belly:

This was the scene in the Woodland Room when I got up this morning, with Missy still sleeping and Nilla doing her "sitting like a person" thing while sunning herself...

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Obviously, we're very happy for the people of EGYPT and their amazing 18-day revolution, throwing off the shackles of authoritarian regime. Like a lot of people, I was reminded of the time the Berlin Wall came down...I was maybe only a year or two out of high school. I remembered watching the whole emotional scene play out on CNN. About 20 years later and I'm watching another revolution happening on CNN.

I was also reminded of this POSTCARD that our friend Peter sent to us from Egypt a couple of years ago - it's been on our fridge (along with many other awesome postcards from him and our friends) ever since. Check out the cute drawings he did of Oreo and Nilla!

Thursday, February 10, 2011

I had an Alchemy request (commissioned order) through Shoppe Sugar Cookie for some buttons. These buttons are for Kathy's husband, who is having a birthday soon...they each represent an animal he has eaten in HOT DOG form!